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dkd903 writes "KDE 4.7 is almost here and brings along with it a number of features and performance improvements such as a better Dolphin with a faster file search, ability of KWin to run on Mobile devices, Grub2 integration in KDM and offline search support in the KDE virtual globe, Marble." Here's KDE's own announcement of the release candidate; the final release is planned for July 27. Reader jrepin quotes the KDE announcement: "With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing last-minute showstopper bugs and finishing translation and documentation that comes along with the releases."

A very long time ago, when I was still young and naive, I was looking forward to KDE4 becausea) it promised to be faster than KDE3b) it promised to implement single-sign-on for kwallet

Then it was released and it came with hundreds of completely worthless features (like being able to rotate windows, translucency that only blurs everything needlessly, etc.) and of course lots of bugs but it was not faster and 4.0 also did not provide single-sign-on, the only featur

This is an interesting feature. The problem is that since nothing else support GRUB integration, this actually drives user away. People using this will have their GRUB booting OS not running kdm by default (unless, of course, until they modify their grub.conf)

I didn't read TFS thoroughly enough - KDM (which is the login manager) integrates with grub2. Probably it means that you can do some fancy stuff like tell it to reboot to freebsd, windows or osx (if you have multi boot).

I suppose if you want to sit around while it shuts down, POSTs, and loads grub so you can catch it during that five-second window, you can go ahead. I would prefer to click a button and then walk away.

Seems there is people using it on real mobile devices (and netbooks), but I'd rather have a good desktop environment than yet another project parasitized by the mobile trends.I hate seeing so many signs of the desktop being abandoned in favor of mobile toys. (Let's face it, most of the mobile stuff out there is a toy you can only do so much with...unlike a real computer).

I'd rather have a good desktop environment than yet another project parasitized by the mobile trends

Yeah I get that, but IMO a single framework that I can learn (Qt/kde) that allows me to build desktop and mobile apps is quite compelling. And qt is a good framework. It's some of the best competition out there for.NET so I want to see it succeed.

Also, recently, kde4 has become a good desktop environment. It has come a long way and is completely usable in it's current form.. assuming of course that you ignore the utter bullshit which is nepomuk and striggi..:)

It is my DE of choice indeed, although I use few of the included apps. While I love the system management and the window manager/plasma are tremendously good for me, the apps are extremely lackluster. Moving away to design tablet-y interfaces while those apps are still an eyesore is beyond me.

Also the latest updates (considering the amount of time between each) have been quite...lackluster, not fixing certain "little and rare but crippling" bugs and not improving upon things that started somewhere between

Moving away to design tablet-y interfaces while those apps are still an eyesore is beyond me.

Not the same people work on all apps and interfaces.The mobile work is mostly done by people paid by Nokia, open-slx, and basysKom.

I don't care about Marble, and I don't think improvements to it should be "release notes".

Pre-release notes are not as detailed as the final notes.KDE releases three software bundles every 6 months: Plasma Workspaces, Applications, and Frameworks.In the final release, each bundle gets its own release announcement. Marble in one of the most active KDE Applications and when the devs work hard, they deserve to be mentioned in the (pre-)release notes, be it Marble, Kate, or even some game.

Kate also has significant improvements this update, but no one but Kate developers mention them at all.

Nobody is hindering any Kate dev to extend the release notes draft on KDE's Etherpad instance. It's open to edit for anyone. I look at the draft for the final release announcements at this moment. Heck, even the comments sidebar say that another application than Marble should get spotlight in the upcoming announcement. So far nobody stepped forward with an improved application that was not featured in the KDE Apps 4.6 announcement (even Kate was featured last time http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.6/applications.php [kde.org] )Looking at http://kate-editor.org/ [kate-editor.org] I see no posts mentioning new features for 4.7. There is a quite extensive one for 4.6 but not for 4.7. There are some articles about current GSoC progress but those won't show up before 4.8.

Who is writing the release notes?

The ones who volunteer to do it, like with any other community project.Feel free to extend release notes drafts yourself.

So yeah, less effort on Nepomuk/Strigi

KDE is a community project mostly made up of volunteers. You cannot force a volunteer to work on something he doesn't want to. Though you can hire one of the firms that do business around KDE to improve the things you prefer.

that everyone but the main devs seem to hate, at least I haven't read or heard anything positive not coming from a KDE dev

I'm not a KDE developer and I like Nepomuk.GNOME/Tracker developers also like Nepomuk which is the reason they've adopted it long ago.

more visible, non-refactoring work so people can stop saying KDE sucks every time.

the attitude of developers in the 4.x series has been one of blatant, selfish, irresponsibility. If my apps had the "millions of users around the globe" that KDE claims, I'd sure as hell be listening more to their needs instead of rejecting their sincere requests as "hate".

KDE is a community project. As such they have no contractual obligations to any customers. So yes, they are selfish to the degree that they work on what they want -- just like any other FOSS community project.

With Nokia abandoning ship to MS mobile, the foss ideal of Qt everywhere looks lost at sea.

The dumbing down of desktops to capture a netbook/tablet market is optimistic in an age where ios/android dominate.In products that actually ship by the millions, the trend is the opposite to gnome's. Namely converting a small screen phone experience to a larger 10" display.In that light, perhaps deskop Linux's best hope could lie with HP's webos. They plan to upscale the touchpad's UI to every HP pc thoughout 2012. F

Nokia is currently in the process of shaping the Qt project after WebKit in the way how the community and the rules are organized.That said, Nokia has increased Qt investments. There are even MeeGo-releated job offers posted on nokia.com. Nokia wouldn't do that if there weren't any secret plans (maybe a future tablet).

Let's give credit where it's due - KDE is the only major desktop environment to handle the tablet metaphor correctly. Unlike Gnome, who replaced the desktop metaphor with a tablet one, they retained their desktop metaphor and added a tablet one as a configurable option. They remained a good desktop environment while still adding tablet functionality.I especially like that you can switch between the two without having to logout/reboot - this is especially desirable when you have something like the Asus Trans

Is this just theoretical or are people actually running kde on real phones/tablets?

I tried the plasma-netbook interface for my wife's new laptop and it's a complete trainwreck. I fiddled for two hours (really hard to configure and buggy) before going back to plasma-desktop and setting up Daisy as a left dock with a minimal top-edge activity panel and pinned items in the system tray.

Konqueror 3.5x is still far and away the best file manager ever, the terminal emulator worked properly, meta-data worked perfectly, you could even edit music tags from the file manager. In the meantime KDE4 has a new tags/comments functionality that I wonder if ANYONE ever uses, but I wouldn't know if it would come in handy because the first thing I do in a new install is disable the Nepomuck Semantic desktop search shit which completely lugs my machines and NEVER finishes indexing my admittedly largish file system, even when the database begins to fill entire partitions.

Nepomuk doesn't search anything. Strigi does. Nepomuk works without Strigi.The Konqueror 3.5 developers became largely inactive for whatever reason. The file browsing part is now almost exclusively developed by the Dolphin guys who do not care much for Konqueror. (Such things can happen in a volunteer effort.)

Ah, someone who is informed about Nepomuk and Strigi ! Could you please help me take advantage of these two features? How do I, as a semi-geek user, use it on a day-to-day basis? What do these features do? I posted a semi-humourous posting asking for help, and the responses I got were essentially "we're just as clueless as you".

What does Nepomuk do? Can I choose not to install it? What happens if it's not present? If I'm not u

Nepomuk is two things: A set of specifications for saving metadata and a background server.Users don't interact with Nepomuk directly but software may use it. For example tags entered in Digikam or KMail are handled using Nepomuk.

I don't know how certain KDE Applications behave without Nepomuk. I have it enabled without any disadvantage. (Strigi is disabled for me.)

- It looks nice.- Plasma and plasmoids (webcomics, twitter, system monitors and much more on the desktop)- It's configurable.

Some of the apps are better than Gnome equivalents (KTorrent, Amarok, KDevelop are the main ones I use), some are worse, but that doesn't really matter since you can freely mix both. However, while KDE/Qt programs look good on Gnome, Gnome/Gtk apps still don't look quite the same on KDE. The oxygen-gtk theme helps here, but you can still notice the difference.

The oxygen-gtk theme helps here, but you can still notice the difference.

Well, the KDE/Qt devs can only do so much. The KDE/Qt side built in GTK theming right into the toolkit while OTOH the GTK devs are not interested in doing such deep integration work. Oxygen-gtk was (again) written by KDE but as a mere theme it can't do as much as integration right in the toolkit.

Which version of Gnome are you using? Right now, KDE4 is much more stable, and customizable than Gnome3. However if you're looking at Gnome2, I'd say it still beats out KDE4 in the "just works" department.

If I were choosing between the 3, it would look like this: Gnome 2 > KDE4 > Gnome 3

That being said, I'm using neither. When Gnome 3 replaced Gnome 2 in the Arch Linux repository, I switched to XFCE4, and haven't looked back since.

This may devolve into a vi/emacs debate, but I'll ask anyways.
I'm running Ubuntu, and and quite happy with Gnome (having quickly borfed Unity). What could KDE offer that might convince me to try it out?

Well, we can argue better this and more refined that until we're blue in the face. Bottom line is that KDE offers a wholly-different perspective on what a Linux desktop user interface can do. Minimally, it's worth taking a look at, if only to broaden your horizons and solidify your preferences.

Personally, I find KDE to be a much more polished, integrated, and comprehensive suite than GNOME. It's snappy, sexy, and highly-configurable. In terms of appearance, KDE definitely has more of a stylistic Mac OSX-like approach and graphic set, though that's also highly-configurable. In fact, KDE's UI is so versatile that I could use KDE to recreate a default GNOME desktop without much effort. The applications tend to favor configurability over simplicity (which seems to be the opposite of much of GNOME's design choices). I can fine-tune most KDE applications to my personal, picky standards. Due to KDE4's kwin window manager rewrite, compositing (3D) effects are built into KDE's core, and are much more seamless than GNOME2's (although GNOME3 has followed suit).

Now, KDE has quite an advanced suite of applications that they bring to the table. However, keep in mind that almost every KDE application will run just fine under GNOME, and vice-versa. You can try almost any KDE application within GNOME should you find one you like (for example, I definitely prefer KDE's Konsole terminal over GNOME's gnome-terminal. The opposite is also true - any GNOME application will work just fine under KDE. You don't have to choose one over the other, though each is designed around and better-integrated with its native environment. Another winner is KDE's Amarok, which has long-held my personal favor as the best available audio player anywhere.

That said, I highly recommend giving it a shot. If you're using Ubuntu, you can try it with no risk by just installing the kubuntu-desktop and kde-full packages and choosing KDE as your window manager at login. It's worth a few days' trial to find out what you truly like.

Personally, I find KDE to be a much more polished, integrated, and comprehensive suite than GNOME.

I agree--and it's why every time I've tried KDE I've abandoned it and gone back to XFCE or Gnome after a few days.

"Ugh, kmail sucks, I'm gonna use Thunderbird... KOffice still blows, gotta set it to open files with (Open/Libre)Office instead. Konqueror? Fuck no, Firefox or Chromium or Opera, anything but that piece of crap. Amarok is so damn slow and bloated, need to find another player, not many QT options,

Personally, I use LibreOffice with KDE integration and Firefox with KDE integration.LibreOffice-KDE doesn't even use GTK because its own VCL toolkit only optionally interfaces with GTK.That said, I'm pretty impressed with current Alphas of Calligra (KOffice's successor). Ever since Nokia invests in it for MeeGo (contributing a smartphone GUI as well as vastly improving file compatibility among other improvements) I have had only one RTF file not reading properly in mine (granted: limited) testing of Calligr

Personally, I find KDE to be a much more polished, integrated, and comprehensive suite than GNOME.

I agree--and it's why every time I've tried KDE I've abandoned it and gone back to XFCE or Gnome after a few days.

"Ugh, kmail sucks, I'm gonna use Thunderbird... KOffice still blows, gotta set it to open files with (Open/Libre)Office instead. Konqueror? Fuck no, Firefox or Chromium or Opera, anything but that piece of crap. Amarok is so damn slow and bloated, need to find another player, not many QT options, guess I'll use a GTK solution..."

And so on, until I'm barely using any QT apps and almost no apps at all that integrate well with KDE, and all the while KDE seems to be mocking me for not using its integrated apps, most of which I hate.

If you like its default apps, fine. If not, all that work to make a tightly integrated DE and apps is just a bunch of useless bloat and features that only half-work if you don't do things exactly the way the devs want you to. I don't even like any of its competitors that much, and I really want to like KDE because it looks nice and has a few nice features that the others don't, but it's hard to justify using it if you don't run a single k* app.

My KDE experience usually involves a good number of GTK applications, too. For example, my core browser is Google Chrome or Firefox (both GTK), I use Thunderbird for e-mail, and I definitely use exclusively LibreOffice. KDE is not an all-or-none decision... you can (and should) pick applications based on how they work, not whether or not they were developed by the same working group.

Now, that said, much of KDE is under active development, and this is the real deal. It's worth retrying KDE applications ever

For a while, Gnome's Nautilus was the default file manager for my KDE desktop install, while I waited for Dolphin to get a true delete command on the drop down menu. That's been fixed since at least Kubuntu 10.4, but I don't remember if it was done before 9.10 or not. Still KDE ran it like it was native. Why KDE in more general terms? There's slightly more Gnomestuff that works properly in KDE than KDEstuff that works in Gnome (even though most apps, probably 95% or so, wo

I'm writing this not so much as a/. response as a personal one to you that maybe someone my find helpful.

I don't know about the Gnome vs KDE thing. I know it happened, but I didn't decide between the two over small things it was basically a philosophical design issue that had nothing to do with QT license vs GDK's GPL, or even simplifying vs doing everything.

It was that back in 97 KDE had this idea floating around that a person should be able to access anything through anything. That everything co

I find it to be less of a reason to try something out and more looking for insight from others. I can look at a toolbox and bang around with a few tools on my own. But I might overlook the finer points of a particular tool. If someone has a better understanding of those tools and can point out some great uses, then that will certainly give me something to look out for when poking around on my own. I may not find things to my liking. But hopefully I won't be missing something that I would have found rea

I find it to be less of a reason to try something out and more looking for insight from others. I can look at a toolbox and bang around with a few tools on my own. But I might overlook the finer points of a particular tool.

If he wanted to have that, he wouldn't have asked to be convinced to even try it. He'd try it any maybe ask here what the users' favourite features are.

Neither KDE nor Gnome are worth using anymore. Their ongoing decline is part of what made me a Mac user in 2005, and it just keeps getting worse. One has no clue what "stability" means, and the other is actively and proudly user-hostile.

Did exactly the same. Was a KDE user since before 1.0. I think it was KDE Beta 2 where I started. KDE 4.0 changed things for me. Why put up with all the worst aspects of a OSX like UI without the easy hardware configuration. May as well run OSX. SO now all my machines are Macs. I dont think OSX is as good as KDE 3.5 on Linux but its UI is only about as crappy as KDE4.X but I get to plug bits of hardware in without thinking too much about it. A real shame.

If you are happy with Gnome, stay with Gnome.For myself, I like Kate, Kile, Dolphin, Kaffeine, Amarok, KOrganizer, Klipper, Kmail, Yakuage, Konsole, KTorrent. I like the plasma desktop and I like the 3D effects. I like the full customization of KDE, but I'm only using maybe 5% of that, the rest are still the default settings, but it's a good feeling that if I need it I can change it. And I like the various plasma widgets, like battery, knetworkmanager, printer applet, device notifier. But I'm a really cons

* Customization is encouraged and is not hid from the end user. Don't like a key binding? change it. Don't like the default start menu? Change it. Want a new action when you right click? Write a quick bash script (or whatever your scripting language of choice is) and a desktop resource file and you can select files, right click and do what you want. You can even change how your desktop works... want files on it? OK. Want news, twitter and weather? OK. Want nothing? Fine. Wa

KDE 4.2... 4.3... 4.4... 4.5...4.6... and we're already approaching 4.7. Does this mean a major update, KDE 5, is coming sooner than might be expected? If so, I hope it's just a logical update instead of a massive overhaul like KDE4 was... it was absolutely horrible at first, but now it's just getting good. I'd hate to see the KDE3 -> KDE4 cycle all over again. Hopefully they slow down and just start incrementing the next number to the right, or they go up to and past 4.10 (though in the project

KDE 4.2... 4.3... 4.4... 4.5...4.6... and we're already approaching 4.7. Does this mean a major update, KDE 5, is coming sooner than might be expected?

I don't think one implies the other. KDE reaching 4.7 has more to do with the fact that they consistently release about every 6 months, and 4.0 was released about three and a half years ago. I wouldn't read any more into the numbers than that.

Yes, although KDE 4.8 is still planned, there is talk about a KDE 5 now. However, it's not going to be a big rewrite like last time (mostly thanks to Qt 5 not being a big rewrite, like last time), but will instead just be a cleanup of current APIs and removing some old cruft from from the early days of KDE 4.0. Most of the currently used and working code will be left alone, with perhaps a bugfix here and there.

All in all, it sounds like it'll be a much smoother transition than KDE3 to KDE4 was.

There is no KDE5 and there will never be: http://vizzzion.org/blog/2011/06/there-is-no-kde5/ [vizzzion.org] With Qt 5 approaching in 2012 and provided the world doesn't end that year, we'll see KDE Frameworks 5.0 relatively soon. According to current rough estimates posted on mailing lists likely the winter (January) release 2013 will make the advent of KDE Frameworks 5.0. So far I didn't read of any plans to shift away from KDE's usual 6 months release cycle and Summer 2012 should be too early.

the akonadi/nepomuk dependency? If not, wgaff? I won't touch desktop linux again until this semantic desktop bullshit runs its course and the kde devs/designers pull their heads out their asses. I've grudgingly switched my office (5 workstations) back to MS after 8 or so years on Debian/Ubuntu. Heaven forbid Microsoft ever figures out how to create a real shell, I'll never even have to think about it again. I mean seriously, fixed width, STILL have to hit that shitty little menu to copy and paste? Pow

Heaven forbid Microsoft ever figures out how to create a real shell, I'll never even have to think about it again. I mean seriously, fixed width, STILL have to hit that shitty little menu to copy and paste?

he is not trolling, kde is getting bloated more and more.
f.e. kmail.
worked flawless before kde-sc 4.6
with 4.6 it is unusable due the semantic desktop bullshit that made things much slower... even on an SSD drive...
well that happens when you add another layer (db) between the files and the userinterface....
fuck kde i am close to switching to something else...
virtuose-t is doing something right now. eating lots of cpu%. what does it do? i dont know, what is it for? i dont know. what features or advanta

It's worse than windows. I tried KDE for all of 3 days, on a laptop which had Windows 7 and Ubuntu (Gnome) already installed. It ran slower than Windows 7 in pretty much every task, and FAR slower than gnome.

When your GUI slows down a linux install to the point that even Windows seems speedy in comparison, you've REALLY fucked things up.

I just haven't had this experience. My guess is that your graphics card is not well supported by the drives and KWin is thus running slowly and with lag. That'll make the whole experience suck. Indeed, that *was* my experience with KDE up until about 4.4 and especially 4.5 when numerous improvements were made to KWin. But many users are still left out in the cold.

As for the non-graphical stuff, I find it to be considerably snappier than Windows on the same machine. Apps start nearly instantly, and that's without the SuperFetch/ReadyBoost garbage that Windows loves (I very much enjoy having my computer nearly useless for 10 minutes after boot up because Windows needs to do heavy I/O on my HD for all of its caches -- and the apps don't even really start up super quick anyway!).

The one thing I've hated is the semantic desktop garbage. So I got rid of it and now it doesn't bug me anymore. You might want to consider turning that off. It can hog the CPU and HD and that would make things slow.

Gnome hardware-acceleration worked just fine, as did XFCE with compiz-fusion running for effects, so I doubt it was a driver issue. It was only KDE that was slow as hell.

I've gotten rid of linux entirely at the moment, because I can't figure out a way to do whole-disk encryption and have both linux and windows running on the same drive. Truecrypt works for windows, and linux has it's own solutions, but none of them work for both. Next time I install linux, I'll try getting rid of the "semantic desktop g

I had the same experience with KWin -- compiz was fine, but KWin was slow. KWin exercises different paths in the driver and OpenGL stacks. Furthermore, KWin developers chose to go with the right solution, versus the hacky one that worked on the drivers at the time, which was the compiz philosophy. Agree or disagree, that's what they did. I'm using the OS ATI driver and it's actually quite performant now.

I switched to Trinity KDE because I hated KDE4.x so much. I just can't stand it. I actually kept using an old distro because I was unwilling to "upgrade" to KDE4.x, when I discovered the Trinity KDE project, it was such a relief. I was able to go to a much new distro but keep a user experience that didn't feel like I was using a big cell phone.

Nope, but with where Nokia is going it must be up for adoption. Maybe not officially, but if you waved a few million dollars in that direction I think they're very ready to divest that part of their business. Already they've sold off the commercial licensing to Digia, so if they're not selling it, not putting in their own phones (maybe they'll finish shipping a phone or two, but certainly not on the roadmap) then why should they continue pouring millions into it? Their market message is less than stellar cl

Less text, less icons. If you need to have icons, make them BIG. Reduce the visible options.

Why should the KDE community mimic GNOME? GNOME exists already. There is no point in acting like GNOME with GNOME still very active.Plasma Desktop and KDE Apps are targeted towards a different audience.

for konqueror, I am not sure what you want. I don't remember a NeXT-like column view ever being available. If you mean the splitting of the interface recursively, it is still there.

new tab for konsole? just double-click on a free area of the tab bar.

Reintegrate file browsing into konqueror? Uh? type any local URL in the location bar, and you are browsing your files.

As for the desktop and panel right-click... Are you sure you are not confusing gnome and KDE. 'cause I can add any service menu to the right click. In fact the desktop and panel of KDE4 are way more configurable than the ones from KDE3.

But clearly, you must be an amazingly anal person to consider that the whole desktop is incomplete because you basically would like a button instead of a double-click. Seriously. Get some perspective.

GNOME Shell's top panel is pretty small, and you can launch apps with favorites, ALT+F2, and searching for them GNOME Do/Windows 7-style. If your desktop can run it, I don't see what the big deal is. 3.2 and onwards will only get better.

... and as long as KDE will allow me to have a *small* panel at the top of the screen onto which I can place launchers for all my favourite apps/locations/files, then it's a done deal:-)

Yes, it is possible. I just checked: The minimum panel height is 10 pixels, although icons dragged to it don't scale below 16 pixels (so they're cut off when you have a smaller panel).Personally, I usually have a bigger panel and use the Quick Launch applet to to have two lines of smaller icons.